The entries dated December 4, 1804 offer an unusually clear case study in how the Lewis and Clark journals diverge even when narrators are nominally in the same place. William Clark and John Ordway, both writing from the half-built Fort Mandan, converge on a shared event: the visit of the Mandan chief known as Black Cat. Patrick Gass’s published narrative for the same date, however, describes a wholly different scene — a river crossing, an Indian swimmer, a creek called Teel — that belongs to an earlier point in the expedition. The disjunction is itself a piece of evidence about how these texts were assembled.
Clark and Ordway: Convergence at Fort Mandan
Clark opens with the weather and the river, his customary frame:
a Cloudy raw Day wind from the N. W. the Black Cat and two young Chiefs Visit us and as usial Stay all Day the river rise one inch finish the main bastion
The phrase “as usial” is telling. By December 4 the expedition had been encamped near the Mandan villages long enough that chiefly visits had become routine, almost a daily expectation. Clark folds the diplomatic event into the same sentence as the river’s one-inch rise and the completion of the bastion, treating chief and carpentry as parallel facts of garrison life.
Ordway, writing in his sergeant’s register, foregrounds the labor and the hospitality side of the same visit:
pickets & bringing them &. C. the chief of the 2nd vil. the Black cat came to dine with our officers accompanied by Several other Indians &. C.
Where Clark notes that Black Cat “Stay all Day,” Ordway specifies the social occasion — a dinner with the officers — and supplies the political identifier Clark omits: Black Cat is “the chief of the 2nd vil.,” that is, the second Mandan village, Ruptáre. Ordway also documents the fatigue detail of pickets being hauled in, the rank-and-file labor that produced the bastion Clark records as finished. Read together, the two entries reconstruct a fuller day: enlisted men dragging timbers while the captains entertained a chief who had become a familiar guest.
A Detail Only Clark Notes
Clark closes his entry with a private observation that neither Ordway nor Gass records:
our interpetr. we discover to be assumeing and discontent’d
The interpreter in question — almost certainly one of the engagés rather than Charbonneau, who was hired later — is being assessed by the captain in terms of attitude and reliability. This is the kind of internal personnel note that does not appear in Ordway’s more public-facing sergeant’s journal, and it illustrates a consistent register difference: Clark’s field notebook absorbs management concerns, suspicions, and judgments of character that the enlisted journals systematically omit.
The Gass Anomaly
Gass’s entry under this date describes something else entirely. He writes of halting at noon the day before, of shallow water and sandbars, of an Indian who
swam across the river to see us, when we stopped for breakfast
and of passing “Teel creek” before encamping on an island. None of this matches the Fort Mandan setting where the party had been stationary since early November. Teel Creek and the swimming visitor belong to the upriver journey of late summer or early autumn 1804.
The explanation lies in the textual history of Gass’s Journal. Gass’s original manuscript does not survive; the published 1807 edition was rewritten by David McKeehan from Gass’s notes, and its dating is notoriously unreliable, with entries occasionally misaligned or compressed. The December 4 entry as printed appears to be displaced material from an earlier stretch of the voyage. The contrast with Clark and Ordway, who agree on weather, personnel, and the Black Cat’s presence, throws the editorial intervention in Gass into sharp relief.
For researchers, the lesson of this date is methodological. Where Clark and Ordway corroborate one another — and where Ordway supplies the political context (“chief of the 2nd vil.”) that Clark’s shorthand assumes — Gass cannot be used as a third witness. His printed text on December 4, 1804 is testimony not to the day’s events at Fort Mandan but to the conditions under which his journal reached the public.
